In the late 1980s, after a Sabbatical year taking doctoral courses and making plans for my dissertation, I accepted a teaching position at the Downtown Alternative School (DAS). At that time, DAS was a very small Toronto Board alternative school with 60 children from kindergarten through grade 3. As teachers, we had many opportunities for collaborative work. We were particularly interested in notions of democratic schooling, trying to involve parents and students in discussions and decision-making processes. However, we began to realize that when we were all out on the playground, we teachers – despite our idealistic intentions – reverted to more authoritarian styles of control. We wondered how we could change our approach and how that in turn might change our relationships with the children and their relationships with each other. We did some research and reading and found an interesting model in The Community Board of San Francisco, which focused on conflict resolution for somewhat older children.
We adapted the San Francisco model to meet the needs of our school. DAS children wanted to move away from the practice of having a select group of “conflict managers” in order to encourage a broader kind of participation. Our first Peacemakers were the oldest children, the grade threes. Within a short time, we had children as young as five helping others “peacemake”. We wanted to learn about the perceptions of the people involved, and we wanted to film the students and teachers with a talented crew, so that later we would have high-quality material for group discussions, analysis, and use in teacher education. In the early 1990s, I received three years of SSHRC funding that allowed us to study the peacemaking process in more depth. We worked closely with professionals Roberta King and Ron Squire (King Squire Films Ltd.) who came to the school every six weeks to film for the full day, from 8:30 am until 6:00 pm. We made sure that footage was gathered in all three participating classes, and on each occasion we tried to identify significant themes and follow children who we guessed would have important things to teach us that day. After school hours we interviewed teachers, children, and even some parents as they came to collect their children. This research resulted in a number of publications (including a co-authored book, Children as Peacemakers, Heinemann, 1995) and a feature length documentary, Life at School -– the DAS Tapes, which was launched in Toronto in 2001. This documentary is used in teacher education programs as well as in school workshops. It has been screened at many conferences here and abroad.
More than ten years have passed since the original Children as Peacemakers study, and the children are no longer children. I wanted to find out what had happened to the original participants from the study, and so I applied for a second three-year SSHRC grant. The funding received has allowed us to videotape interviews with some of the former DAS students, their families, and their former K – 6 teachers. Currently, we are creating multiple short pieces, 10 – 15 minutes in length, from the recent interviews. These will be available as pod casts together with clips of footage from the original project showing them as children in the DAS context. We hope that our ongoing work will continue to inform teacher education and classroom practice. As well, we hope it will reach policy makers, who are responsible for budget and curriculum decisions. An update on our project will follow in the winter of 2008, with analysis of interviews and short video pieces posted here for your viewing.